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Reading the End Posts

Review: The Village, Nikita Lalwani

Less assured than Lalwani’s first book, Gifted, but still, an intriguing meditation on identity and the ethics of documentary film The beginning: A young British woman of Indian descent has been chosen by the BBC to film a documentary about a small village in India. The village houses about 48 families, and in each family, one member is a murderer. Ashwer is a prison without locks, a place for well-behaved convicts to live with their families and enjoy some degree of autonomy. In its years of operation, no prisoner has ever reoffended, and only one has ever attempted to escape.…

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Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi

Note: I received this ebook from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. The beginning: That’s the first line of Boy Snow Bird, and doesn’t it remind you of how much you’ve missed Helen Oyeyemi? In her newest book, a girl named Boy runs away from her abusive father, a rat-catcher, to a small town called Flax Hill. There she meets a man called Arturo Whitman, and maybe she falls in love with him, and she…

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Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory

Am I just reading a lot of good speculative fiction lately, or is speculative fiction being extra awesome recently? The beginning: Pandemonium has a killer premise in a lot of ways. First, the basic premise baldly stated — a world exactly like ours except that starting in the 1940s/1950s, random acts of demonic possession started happening — is awesome. Second, the particulars of the premise — there are only about 100 known demons, who possess people for brief periods of time (a few minutes to a few days, usually), act out fairly consistent scenes, and then jump to another victim…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.18: Tournament of Books, The Golem and the Jinni, and a Literary Winter Olympics Game

The Tournament of Books is on, and the Jennys are here to talk about it! We also review Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni and play a literary Winter Olympics game. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 18 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much). Here are the contents of the podcast if you wish to skip around: Starting at 1:03…

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Review: Bleeding Violet, Dia Reeves

The beginning: A teenager sneaks into her estranged mother’s house in Texas, desperately hoping that she will be allowed to stay. The only family Hanna has ever known were her father and his (Finnish) relatives. Now, with her father dead and her aunt Ulla unable to deal with a manic-depressive niece, Hanna has come from Finland to Portero, Texas, to make her home with her mother, Rosalee. Hanna’s fear is that she will be too weird and crazy for her mother and her new town. Turns out she doesn’t know from weird and crazy. The town of Portero is home…

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Review: Nexus, Ramez Naam

A while ago I accidentally checked out Crux, the second book in a series about a drug called Nexus that expands the human brain’s capacity and permits brains to connect directly to each other. Despite its turning out to be a sequel whose original I hadn’t read, I really liked it. Nexus is the book I meant to check out, so I went back and got that one the next time I was at the library. The beginning: A government agent called Samantha Cataranes has been sent to gather information about a science computer genius guy named Kaden Lane, who…

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Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black

The beginning: Tana wakes up after a party to find that everyone else is dead. She’s surrounded by the bodies of kids she’s known since kindergarten, and there’s a scrape of a bite on her leg that might mean she’s going to become a vampire. When she goes upstairs, she finds two people still alive: Her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, who has been bitten and is in the process of becoming a vampire, and a vampire boy called Gavriel, chained to a bed. When Tana finds them, this is what she thinks: No one else was going to get killed today, not…

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Review: Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan

Note: Whiskey Jenny and I talked about Half-Blood Blues on our most recent podcast — go check it out if you’re a podcast listener! Mumsy is always telling me to write review posts of the books we review on the podcast, so I am giving it a try. The beginning: The first chapter of Half Blood Blues won me over completely. One of my favorite books, Sunshine, begins with the line, It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb, and although that is not an eloquent description of a phenomenon that worries me greatly, it is…

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DWJ March: ALL MY BOOKS

Once again, the wonderful Kristen of We Be Reading is hosting Diana Wynne Jones March! She’s put together a fantastic schedule of events for the month. If you’re a Diana Wynne Jones fan or interested in becoming one, make sure to stop by her blog every day this month to see what she’s got going on over there. To kick off the month, she’s asking people to post pictures of their collection of DWJ books. Fortunately, since I haven’t yet organized my books onto bookshelves in my new apartment, all of my Diana Wynne Jones books were pre-strewn about the…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep. 17: Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals

Surprise comics podcast for you! Whiskey Jenny wasn’t able to record this week, so Randon and I brought back COMICS PODCAST for your delectation and delight. In this episode we read Kelly Sue DeConnick’s run on Captain Marvel, G. Willow Wilson’s new Ms. Marvel, and Matt Fraction’s deeply weird new comic series with Image Comics, Sex Criminals (hear us out). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 17 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the…

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